{"id":235744,"date":"2026-04-23T02:35:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/soundwaves-settle-debate-about-elusive-quantum-particle"},"modified":"2026-04-23T02:35:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T07:35:12","slug":"soundwaves-settle-debate-about-elusive-quantum-particle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/soundwaves-settle-debate-about-elusive-quantum-particle","title":{"rendered":"Soundwaves settle debate about elusive quantum particle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/soundwaves-settle-debate-about-elusive-quantum-particle2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It was a head-spinning discovery. In 2018, researchers in Japan claimed to find concrete evidence of an elusive particle, a Majorana fermion, in a quantum spin liquid called ruthenium trichloride. Majoranas are highly sought-after by quantum materials scientists because when a pair are localized, or trapped, they can securely encode information and form a stable qubit\u2014the building block of quantum computing.<\/p>\n<p>Some researchers heralded the finding and used it to launch their own studies, while others believed the breakthrough\u2014which was made by measuring what\u2019s called the thermal Hall effect\u2014was actually a mirage caused by defects in the material sample.<\/p>\n<p>Cornell researchers have now waded into the debate and their findings, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10420-y\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature<\/i>, show both camps were wrong. By measuring the movement of sound waves rather than the flow of heat, the team discovered the thermal Hall effect was caused by rotating lattice vibrations called chiral phonons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was a head-spinning discovery. In 2018, researchers in Japan claimed to find concrete evidence of an elusive particle, a Majorana fermion, in a quantum spin liquid called ruthenium trichloride. Majoranas are highly sought-after by quantum materials scientists because when a pair are localized, or trapped, they can securely encode information and form a stable [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}